Are these units temporary housing for people on the street? What does the path away from homelessness look like in the bay area, with real estate costs and rent as high as they are?
Its hard to see how someone living on the street is going to be able to afford $1,000+ rent just for a studio apartment on whatever employment they can get coming off the street.
It starts the same way it starts everywhere: by getting sober, getting into a decent shelter, and becoming marketable as an employee. The cost of housing is neither the first barrier nor the primary one, and someone who is sober and marketable can always choose to seek work and housing elsewhere if that really becomes the primary obstacle.
Don't forget that although the cost of housing in SF is very high, so is the minimum wage. And the City has a lot of programs for people who are gainfully employed but struggling with the cost of market-rate housing. What they don't have is housing for someone who spends 20 hours of every 24 lying on the ground cracked out and shitting himself. No landlord can tolerate that kind of behavior, not even a publicly-funded one. It's a health hazard, a danger to other tenants, and does too much damage to the dwelling; never mind the fact that such a tenant will never be able to pay even token rent.
Which makes sense in a practical way, what we should be doing (inclusive we) is funding social programs to help people avoid spending 20 hours a day cracked out shitting themselves, You aren't going to stop everybody but the cost of doing it upfront is so much lower than doing it later.
That of course require that a government have a cohesive and inclusive strategy for dealing with the welfare of it's citizens and we don't seem to have that in the UK let alone the US.